How you do One Thing is How you do Everything
How you do one thing is how you do everything. This has come up not an insignificant amount of times for me in the last few weeks. I think about it around comfort zones and challenge, around the drive to exercise and the commitment to eat better foods. I think about it when people tell me they don’t have time to exercise or “could never give up cheese.”
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately also because I’ve been reading Rich Diviney’s book, 25 Attributes. I spend a lot of my days in my job, helping people start exercising. Either for the first time in a long time, or at least the first time in doing Pilates and adopting mindful, intentional movement. I often explain briefly to the individual how the exercise can help them, make sure they understand a few basic principles, and then just get them to start, and do. After the first session, I mostly already have it figured out whether they will stick around, come back, be inconsistent, or be all in and committed. How you do one thing is how you do everything. This isn’t a judgement call, just a reality.
The people who struggle to go outside their comfort zone at work, eat the same meals regularly, go to the same selection of places on the weekend, are the same people who struggle to go outside their comfort zone during exercise. They show up and do the same thing every week: attend the same class, talk to the same people, work at the same intensity and use the same weight of dumbbells. Some things never change
Diviney has deduced, it is an innate characteristic or attribute to be inclined to go outside one’s comfort zone and therefore, not something everyone possesses. How you do one thing is how you do everything. There is nothing wrong with this – for some people it is an idyllic lifestyle. But it explains why when change is desired, these same people struggle to adopt exercise, keep eating food they know is bad for them, or end up in a job they hate and stay there for years to come.
The crux of this is at the pivot point, where change is desirable, but it is hard to figure out how to break out of these one thing to everything loops. Diviney denotes in his book, that while attributes are inherent, and are not something that can be taught as simply as a skill, you can change your place on the continuum. For example, you can’t teach grit with a step by step process, but you can go from a place where you are not gritty to where you are more gritty. Specific attributes are often made up of other attributes or components, and improving on the parts improves the whole. Grit for example, Diviney notes is made up of courage, resilience, adaptability and perseverance. Over time, progression in these areas makes you grittier, and gritty people “stick to stuff” when it gets tough; like when exercise is hard or making a healthy dinner option is harder than choosing take out.
The thing is though, as simple as this sounds – work on one attribute and you will get better at the others – it is not that. it’s simple but not easy. Uncomplicated, but for each individual, complex. There are a lot of moving parts for each of us when we think about making these changes. But the moving parts and the challenge around doing it ends up becoming the reason we don’t do it. In other words, we let the thought of changing and the work in front become a hurdle to even starting. I know that’s true, because I’ve done it.
The gap amidst all of this however, is this degree of blame and fault we place on ourselves when we struggle to achieve something or keep going with something we started. The amount of shame and self-deprecating stories we tell ourselves when we feel like we are giving up or quitting. To be sure, I am all for gritting it out, pushing through, doing things that are hard and building the resilience and toughness to keep going when motivation is lost and the reward is far away. But if it’s not a good fit, if things aren’t working out, if you genuinely can’t commit to the thing you said you were going to do, let’s stop now. Let’s own it and end it and stop playing around on the edges like we will get it back together again.
I don’t know if there is any single point or conclusion here, other than to say, start looking for the patterns and themes in your life that govern how you do things and your behaviours and habits around them. You will likely see that things follow the same pattern or there is a similar theme. If you like it, keep going. If you don’t do something different. Nothing changes if nothing changes: how you do one thing is how you do everything.